AMORGO, 2020

Nikos Gatsos Amorgos: An Exploration in Translation and Painting

Text by Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos, Images by Christos Damianos, 2020

The focus of this Publication is a new translation of Nikos Gatsos’ Αμοργός (1943), which makes available in English one of the most remarkable modernist Greek poets. Gatsos (1911-1992) Arcadia, attended the University of Athens in the early 1930s. In 1943, during one of the darkest periods of Greece’s occupation by the Germans and their allies, he published Amorgos, a long poem written in a single night, Amorgos offers a re-imagining of the Greek poetic tradition that mixes Avant-guard movements such as surrealism, symbolism and modernism with the tradition of folk songs so popular in the Arcadia of his youth. Addressing the themes of loss and hope, of the lyrical and the erotic, of a deep passion for Greek landscapes, philosophy, history and culture.